Born in Sweden - taking on the world

T-Meeting was born out of meeting a need.

As company owners Max and Faruk Tairi developed their video conferencing business in the southern Swedish city Malmö, they found that while video conferencing for people with normal hearing was a “nice to have”, for deaf people using sign language, it was a “must have”.

When they contacted the Swedish Deaf Association they found the Deaf had major problems with call-alerting devices that were meant to tell them when there was an incoming video call, so the pair devised a solution.

In 1997, T-Meeting was born as the brothers started developing the total communications system that is now the world leader in functionality and reliability, providing video relay for the Deaf and linking it to Braille systems for the Deaf-blind.

In 2013 they started developing TERA, harnessing artificial intelligence to turn speech into text real time for the hard of hearing, and text into speech for people with speech disabilities.

The revolutionary product was launched in October 2017.

And the company and its work have come full circle - the products that provide communication for people with disabilities have found a market among businesses wanting cutting-edge communications.

Vision, compassion and inspiration

A company’s direction and philosophy start at the top but it takes a special approach to get total buy-in throughout the organization.

Max and Faruk Tairi are driven by two basic philosophies:

• People who are Deaf, blind, have speech disabilities or hearing impairments should have the same communication independence as everyone else
• Technology can provide high-end solutions

They have a genuine compassion that their 100-plus staff of software developers and engineers share. It’s part of the T-Meeting philosophy.

And the sons of Macedonian migrants bring a special discipline and problem-solving ability to their work.

Both are karate exponents, with Max a 6th dan black belt, past European champion and a former Olympic coach, and Faruk 1st dan black belt. Faruk is also a chess maestro, ranked 2527^th in the world, 1922^nd in Europe and 39^th in Sweden. He can play two games blind simultaneously - tracking every piece on two boards in his mind without looking at either game.

The brothers’ drive and focus is behind T-Meeting’s success.